This accounts for the divided opinions that met Mirror’s Edge on release, of course. Ladders, pipes, air ducts and heavy landings are all built into pathways and act as bottlenecks for the speed that defines the joy of Mirror’s Edge, a self-defeating approach to design that leaves the game at its exhilarating best only in brief, powerful bursts. More damningly, even perfect runs entail stop-start traversal that robs the game of its kick. There is no pleasure in failing, just flow-crushing thuds and clumsy collisions, or Faith-crushing falls from rooftops that end with a rush and a crack. The freerunning can be brutally frustrating, partly because, while nothing feels better than intuiting a route and the manoeuvres needed to glide through it, there’s an unavoidable degree of trial-and-error to certain areas and arrangements. The fluency is compulsive, and the action matches the game’s bleached authoritarian theme: running is an essentially subversive act of escape, of expression, and of not prioritising violence above all else.īut Mirror’s Edge is a flawed game, and these moments of harmonious fluency are fleeting. There’s an exquisite thrill to sustaining a top-speed run that incorporates the fluid negotiation of various obstacles-hurdling a fence, bouncing between parallel walls with a 180-degree whip turn, nailing a landing and barging through a door. Environments are no longer arenas and killboxes, but puzzles with physical solutions.
#MIRRORS EDGE CATALYST CRACK ZIP#
What replaces the destructive power of other shooters is a more nuanced physical interaction with the world around us, a fleet-footed agility that links ground slides, wall runs, impact rolls and zip wires with an accumulated, vision-blurring momentum. With the background of The City in place, matched by a rhythmic lo-fi soundtrack, the joy of Mirror’s Edge is in freedom and flow. This, even more than for staring at The City, is where the game’s widened field of vision and HUDless appearance come into their own.
In Mirror’s Edge, we’re the speeding object, and it’s our velocity and precision that matters. This is a reconfiguration of the central kinetic premise of firstperson games: that they’re about moving, aiming and shooting that we run and jump quickly, but we fire, and fire at, things that move faster. The defining triumph of Mirror’s Edge might be the recognition that running away from guns is more interesting than marching around clutching one like a metal comforter. The decision to limit the scope of the shooting in what consequently can’t really be called a firstperson shooter is particularly key. It is a fascinatingly flawed game, whose absences (the paucity of weapons, the empty space of the environment) are often more successful than things positively featured. These failures of story and character are not Mirror’s Edge’s only problems. Perhaps that’s why Mirror’s Edge generated such buzz before release: Faith is a soluble meme, an instant hit. All she says thereafter-the family drama, the underground society of people whose idea of nonconformism is split-toed shoes-diminishes that initial impact of the lithe placeless somebody running from power to survive. Everything potent about Faith can be gleaned at a glance. Primarily, because she’s female, in a gaming world and a generic space dominated by shaven-headed men. Faith is a perfect fit for fuzzily defined anti-authoritarianism. This is also the reason that our hero, Faith, is so much more interesting as an image than as a character. At the centre of it all, a looming point of orientation, is a vast watchtower called the Shard, an imposing, eminently visible testament to the power of observation. On the outside, it’s shiny, empty and pointed on the inside, it’s all stark corridors angling to an overexposed vanishing point. It’s not an as-best-we-can interpretation of reality powered by 2008 hardware, but a geometric impression of totalitarianism, a sanitised vision of brilliant white pierced by urgent primary colours (strident and unambiguous, like diktats) and ironic glass transparency. If the game’s setting-known simply as The City-has aged well, it’s because it was always designed for beauty rather than realism. It’s a game about energy and creativity, and how these are expressed from the confinements of a perspective and a genre more normally given over to destruction, a window for lining up targets and admiring their ends. This is movement as morality in a society built on passive obedience, speed is rebellion and flawless agility is freedom. Its heroes are ‘runners’, athletic outlaws who carry off-grid information in a spotless future of oppressive surveillance and security.